Cost Centres in NAV 2009 R2

Question Status

I was wondering if someone might be able to help me or point me in the right direction.

I have been investigating what options are available to the company I work for in order to improve the way we record and analyse our revenue and costs. We already use dimensions in order to allocate our income/costs to different divisions of the company however I have been researching using cost centres (and cost accounting in general) in order to better split costs between various departments and product types.

I've looked at the principles behind this and it seems that using various cost centres such as Sales, HR, Finance and Production (for our direct costs) might help. Likewise we might want to use cost objects in order to break down income and costs between various different products.

However I am firstly unsure whether this would be what we need. Ideally we would like to be able to break overheads down between various departments (including direct production and COGS) however I don't know if this would be better and more simply served by having another set of dimensions and posting continue overheads to the same g/l accounts, then doing "analysis by dimension".

I am also unsure if our current version of Navision would be able to support cost accounting. We are using NAV 2009 R2 (I am actually using the classic view which I understand is Dynamics 6.0 but they run on the same database and are both used concurrently). Can anyone please advise me whether this is even a possibility with what we have or would an add on or even an upgrade to a newer version of Navision be required? I currently cannot see anything within our version that relates to cost centres.

Sorry for the rather vague question, I am just beginning researching this and would greatly appreciate any help that is on offer regarding the various options available. I have searched for existing questions on cost centres however most of these involved systems already set up and didn't at all address the suitability question.

Many thanks in advance,

Jennifer

Please note I have posted this question in another forum but I am hoping to perhaps reach other users who don't use them so I apologise if you've seen this already.